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open call

On Saturday 27 September 2025, the fourth edition of Museumnacht FRL will take place. During this special night, the Fries Museum, in collaboration with art initiative VHDG, will present a one-night-only exhibition in unexpected locations throughout the museum. For this unique event, VHDG and the Fries Museum are launching a joint open call for artists from various disciplines who live and/or work in the Dutch provinces of Fryslân, Groningen, or Drenthe and would like to be part of this nocturnal art program.
Want to join? Read on!

Are you a visual or performance artist, or do you work with video, sound, or interactive art workshops? Would you like to share your work with a broad audience in Fryslân? Then apply to this Open Call from VHDG and the Fries Museum!
See the requirements at the bottom of this page. This open call is open to everyone: from experienced artists (with or without formal training) to emerging makers and recent graduates.

Poster door Huy Quang Tran | Wang Xoo

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among new faces

From 24 May 2025, the Fries Museum will present the exhibition Beyond the Horizon. In this exhibition, artists from the museum’s collection explore themes like the sea, tides, forests, and specific landscapes such as the Arctic, the Wadden Sea, and the rainforests of Suriname. Their starting point is a connection—whether physical, spiritual, speculative, or critical—with nature and other forms of life.

One of the works on view is The People That Is Missing by Cristina Lucas (Spain, 1973). In this video installation, Lucas addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: human-induced climate change. The title of the work is based on a quote by artist Paul Klee (1879–1940), who believed it was the artist’s role to create a collective future—one that includes forgotten voices, alternative histories, and possible new ways of living together.

This open call draws inspiration from that idea. With Among New Faces, we invite artists to submit works that speculate, imagine, recall, or invent possible communities—either present-day or future.
Which communities are missing from our collective memory? What might a future community look like—here in Fryslân, or far beyond?

Submissions may reflect on art as a site of gathering, as a starting point, a sense of loss, or a space of potential. At the same time, the work can also critically examine what we usually define as “our community.” What if the community we think we know—or believe we belong to—is merely a story we keep telling one another?

Read everything about the open call here!